For those looking for a last-minute Christmas IBM rushed out just the thing in the US yesterday. Having been stymied on its plans to get an 80486 offering into the market ahead of Compaq Computer Corp when bugs in the Intel chip forced it to hold its klugey replacement processor board for the PS/2 Model 70, IBM yesterday came out with the Real Thing in the shape of the PS/2 70-486 – for delivery in the US from yesterday. It does sound as if it’s little more than a Model 70 with the 486/25 Power Platform factory-installed, because IBM says that a 70-386 can be upgraded to the new model by swapping the processor board for the Power Platform. The 70-486 has a 25MHz 80486 processor and comes with 2Mb ZAmory expandable to 8Mb, 1.44Mb floppy, 60Mb or 120Mb disk, serial, parallel, VGA, mouse and keyboard ports, one 16-bit and two 32-bit slots and keyboard, at $12,390 with the 60Mb, $13,000 with the 120Mb disk.
